in new collaborations.
The Commute – An Opera for Towns
Opera for Towns is a new project being developed in partnership with Farnham Maltings, to be performed in towns across the South East region.
Working with the same team who created our community opera The Finnish Prisoner, The Commute is the story of one person’s journey from work to home. A journey that should take fifteen minutes, half an hour, an hour at most. But on this day, it ends up taking much, much, longer.
Based loosely on the journey of Ulysses, the piece will be specifically created for venues common to most towns, a playing field, a town hall, a leisure centre, a pedestrianized shopping street, and performed promenade-style in each of these venues during the length of an entire day. The audience will be free to follow the whole story in one day, or to see various chapters of our protagonist’s long journey home on different days.
As in The Finnish Prisoner, we will once again be employing a combination of professional and amateur performers. We will also be combining different art forms in this work, with music as the common thread, so will be looking for lots of different kinds of participants – dancers, actors, singers, musicians – to be involved.